How to be a Famous Preacher by Mark

SOURCE: 1. Be a good public speaker. Express emotion: either be very good at anger, or weep copiously, or smile successfully. Wear the right outfit for your target audience: a Rolex, leather, tattoos, an Armani suit, whatever cardboard caricature impresses your particular constituents and will make them quit changing channels and watch you. Use a stage set that is part of your presentation: The most successful Christian TV show in the 1980s used French provincial living room furniture with an ornate staircase.

Another successful goateed speaker of the 1980s, Francis Schaeffer, dressed in early 20th century knee breeches to hike across Europe and speak about how the great European artists preached their version of religion, juxtaposed with the true Christian religion.

2. Be able to take a conversion or an answered prayer story and tell it dramatically. Tell only the details that support your premise. Leave out the details that disprove your premise. Don’t be above exaggeration. Edith Schaeffer wrote how their prayers as missionaries in Lausanne, Switzerland, after WW2 were miraculously answered, sometimes down to within a dime of the amount of money they needed to purchase their first L’Abri property.

Her son, in 3 heavily autobiographical novels, tells about how an American missionary family in Lausanne, Switzerland, having purloined the mailing list from their new denominational headquarters in Pennsylvania, sent out glowing reports of their work converting young college atheists in Switzerland, and begging for money for a camp for their evangelism. The denomination demanded the American missionaries cease and desist from using the denomination’s mailing list because their donations dropped precipitously while the L’Abri donations sky-rocketed, but the Schaeffers won the popularity contest and the denomination had to back down.

3. Be able to ask for money easily.Like Rick Warren, be able to make people feel a little bit guilty for not giving money to the mission to convert poor non-Christians in Russia. Pretend you are not begging. “I’m not begging for money, I’m just letting you know how much your contribution to my ministry means to the little orphans in Africa who benefit from it.” Make sure nobody can check on how the money is spent overseas. God told the famous radio preacher, Oral Roberts, that he had to raise 8 million dollars in 3 months or God “would take him home.” He raised the 8 million dollars, which temporarily rescued Oral Roberts University and City of Faith Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma from going under.

4. Look like you already have lots of money, and make your ministry look successful. Like the trainer at Edward Jones financial planning said, “Fake it ’til you make it.” When you are becoming a financial planner, nobody wants you to invest their money unless you look like you already invest lots of people’s money. So the trainer advised: “Fake it.” One famous TV preacher (Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University) always told his TV viewers that he was speaking to a packed capacity crowd, even when there were very few people present. When speaking to reporters he would over estimate his donor pool mailing list by 300% to exaggerate his influence and the power of the Christian right in the 1980s. Conservative Christians are trained to be loyal and to look the other way when one of their heroes exaggerates (lies).

5. Have a successful looking spouse who looks like he/she is fascinated by what you say. Make sure she isn’t too high strung, so that she can look supportive and fascinated for years, through thick and thin, through unbridled boredom, for richer for poorer, through unfaithfulness and humiliation. Like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, have your acts of penance ready for the bumps in the road.And like Jimmy Lee Swaggart, act out your contritions in high melodrama with tearful appeals to God for forgiveness. Don’t be afraid to be so outlandish that your lives will be parodied on Saturday Night Live. Your constituents operate at a 7th grade level, emotionally and intellectually. Whatever worked in 7th grade, will work to make you a successful pastor. Face lifts are almost required for the TV preachers and their wives over 50.

6. Pretend you’re not bragging. “I don’t want any of the glory for myself, I’m just telling you what the Lord has done in my life.” “I pray four hours per day.” Rick Warren: “My book, The Purpose Driven Life, sold more copies than the top 10 New York Times best sellers combined.” Nevermind that biblical scholars are horrified at how Warren used the scriptures out of context to mean things that the scripture clearly did not mean, the book still was wildly popular.

7. Preach about things that your listeners already believe in. Do not challenge the status quo. Your supporters will be in Fowler’s stage 3 faith, trusting that you will be leading them into the center of the faith. Use the catch phrases and evangelicalor pentecostal lingo that let people know they are part of the in crowd. Like Pat Robertson, find a niche: Create an “Us versus Them” scenario that your supporters can feel righteously indignant about: In the 80s it was abortion and humanism. In the current age it is old evangelicalism versus post-evangelicalism. Or Covenantal Calvinism versus the God who learns as time goes by. Or New Age Buddhism versus the God who cares for us personally.

9. Drop names of famous people you have met: entertainers, politicians, business owners. Like Billy Graham, remain loyal to President Nixon until he turns out to be a sleaze. Like James Dobson, support popular wars and the lost blue collar young men that die in them. It is interesting that Jesus was almost anarchic in the absence of name-dropping of the rich and powerful.

10. Hint at a hierarchical competitive Christian ladder that your listeners can attempt to climb in order to grow in status in the Christian community. “She prays 8 hours per day!”

11. Promise your listeners tacitly that if they follow your teachings their lives will be full of faith and promise, their marriages will be full of love, their children will grow up productive, happy and faithful churchgoers. Make it seem like life is hopeful, predictable and manageable, like all they have to do is reject a couple of popular books, movies and TV shows, or wear the appropriate uniform, or go to the right seminars and their lives will become easy, joyful and successful, maybe even promise them they will be successful in their careers and wealthy, or that all their diseases will be healed.

12. Don’t be too soft hearted. The most successful pastors in America today plow through volunteers and “leave the wounded in their wake” as Christianity Today magazine described James Dobson and his Focus on the Family ministry in the early ’90s. An exterior of a tough Christian pastor that protects a wounded child interior is the best recipe for a successful ministry. A couple of diagnoses from the DSM-V are helpful to the successful pastor as well, the most popular being Bipolar II, and Narcissistic Personality, with a wife who has Histrionic Personality. At the very least you need to be the adult child of an alcoholic parent, even better if the parent was suicidal.

13. Preach hard against sexual sin, but it doesn’t hurt to adopt a little sexual deviancy yourself. Rolling Stone Magazine (1986) reported that a male employee said Jim Bakker extorted blow-jobs from him, and Jimmy Swaggart’s prostitute said she wouldn’t want her kids hanging around Jimmy Swaggart because of the sex acts he liked (mostly watching). This came out after Jimmy Swaggart exposed his main competitor in Baton Rouge for committing adultery. 69% of evangelical men admit using porn in the last month, and 25% of pastors report they are currently having an affair with a member of their congregation.